Contact - ICDAR2017 Robust Reading Challenge on end-to-end recognition on the Google FSNS dataset

Anguelos Nicolaou is a doctoral student at the CVC under the supervision of Dr Karatzas since 2014. He obtained his Bachelor’s degree from the TEI of Athens in 2010. During his bachelors studies, he was an intern at CIL in the Research Center Demokritos.  He obtained his Master of Science from the University of Bern in 2014. His research is focused in scene-text and robust reading systems. His interests extend to document image segmentation, texture analysis, performance evaluation, soft biometrics, neural networks etc.

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Ray Smith is a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google Inc, Mountain View, CA, USA, currently working in the Google Maps team. He received his PhD from the University of Bristol, UK in 1988. 

Apart from developing technology for extracting information from Street View images to improve Google Maps, Ray was the primary developer of the Tesseract Open Source OCR Engine, and continues to develop it, including adding LSTM-based neural networks to it in the most recent release.

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Suman Ghosh is a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department of the UAB and the Computer Vision Center, under the supervision of Dr. Ernest Valveny.  He received his B.Tech. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the West Bengal University of Technology, Kolkata in 2006, and his M.E. degree in Computer Science and Information Technology from the Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology, Shibpur (Formerly Bengal Engineering and Science University, Shibpur) in 2010. His research work is mainly focused on Word Spotting from images from different sources. Other interests related to pattern recognition include document analysis, handwritten documents and word spotting, Scene text recognition .

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Ernest Valveny is an Associate Professor at Universitat Autònoma Barcelona and senior researcher at Computer Vision Center in Document Analysis Group. He received his PhD from the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona in 1999. He has been working for more than 20 years in the field of document analysis, focusing more specifically on Robust Reading during the last years. He has an ample record of publications in international conferences and journals on this topic. He has led several research and technology transfer projects with companies. He is the current director of the Computer Science Department at UAB.

He is member of the IAPR TC-10 and TC-11 and he has been involved in the organization of different events in the field of document analysis (ICDAR, GREC) and was also responsible for the organization of the series of symbol recognition competition in the context of the GREC workshop.

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Dimosthenis Karatzas is a Senior Research Fellow at the Computer Vision Centre, Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona, Spain. He received his PhD from the University of Liverpool, UK in 2003. He has co-authored over 90 publications in refereed journals and conferences.

He is leading the Robust Reading research team at the Computer Vision Centre, and has been principal investigator on numerous research and knowledge transfer projects. In 2013 he received the IAPR / ICDAR Young Investigator Award.

D. Karatzas has served in various roles at major conferences in his field (ICDAR, DAS, CBDAR, ICPR, ICFHR), including co-chairing IWRR 2016, CBDAR 2015 and IWRR 2014. D. Karatzas is a lead organiser of the Robust Reading Competitions series. He served as a guest editor for the Int. Journal of Document Analysis and Recognition special issue on “Robust Reading” in 2015.

D. Karatzas has been a founding member and a member of the executive committee of the UK Chapter of the SPIE, while he is currently the chair of IAPR TC-11 (Reading Systems), a member of the IAPR-Industrial Liaison Committee and member of the IEEE, the SPIE and the IAPR. In 2007 D. Karatzas co-founded the spin-off company TruColour, UK, which specializes on perception-based color calibration solutions.